Defining deliverables for innovation - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

We are in need of a common language for innovation

@paul4innovating — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:57:20 +0000

German Late Medieval (c. the 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.

Any innovation common language needs working upon. It firstly needs recognition it is in our best interests to find a common point. It needs to be relevant to each of us, it must be current, appropriate, accurate and highly visible throughout the entire organization. It also needs to be allowed to grow and flourish, to evolve and become the lingua franca of all our innovation work. It needs building and constructing in conscious ways and design.

Let’s step back just for one minute, these ‘sentiments’ are fine, yet we actually do, seriously lack a common language for innovation and we should find the ways and the means to change this. It holds innovation back significantly. It can’t continue in a world of greater networking and collaboration.

Languages unites us or keeps dividing us

Language can have the power to unite us or potentially divide us. Developing a language to unite us in our innovation efforts goes some way to reduce disagreements and egos, to qualify individual interpretation or bias, often a key inhibitor that can block a team’s success. It lays in a common foundation. It builds confidence and understanding.

Once we have a common language, we can set about building and creating a more robust innovation management system. One that builds on this framework so it can relate to the relevant context, conditions, and environment for innovation, to offer within this building block, the common identity.

These identifiers can build into better understanding how to structure governance, process, and functional structures, to build a culture that is responsive as ‘they’ can identify a need for a common cause of understanding. It is in this central innovation language that becomes our clear unifying context, the enabler, and sense of personal identity with the purpose of what we are wishing to achieve.

In any common language, we need to master the understanding, the nuances and how it all fits together. We need to exploit it and extract what it can offer to enhance all the work we do in innovation. We need to appreciate always its terms, its definitions (and limitations) and the related performance values that can help to improve our performance and in our achievements of working increasingly with others. A common understanding of our meaning to ‘innovate’ becomes an imperative.

Today we all having a different meaning and interpretations within our innovation understanding.

Each organization has specifics in meaning that can often end up in results that break down and so deliver results totally different from their original intent. As we grow out our collaborations into ecosystems the need for a common language becomes even more vital. For example:

Often misunderstanding occurs, even though we initially thought we had communicated well but those that receive this often apply different interpretations that confirm their personal views,
There is always this risk that others often apply subtle nuances and variations built on their experiences or understanding on how ‘something works’, and it is within these different readings we can suffer costly errors, extensive delays and wrong end results in the final product or service delivery.
We suffer significant inefficiencies because we don’t pay enough attention to ensuring the correct meaning is well understood, we simply believe our way of thinking is the only way it is conveyed to be understood, and as we all know, this is often far from the reality. Context and Communications are kings in my opinion.
We need to seek explicit language and context to allow innovation to do its final job, of delivering a valuable new contribution that builds on the existing and meets new market and customers’ needs or the jobs-to-be-done.

Innovation becomes highly constrained if we fail to find that common language, that common purpose, the understanding of the right context and ended up providing something that was not as good as it could have been, or we simply veered completely off track, on the original insight. It somehow got lost in translation, in applying individual meaning. Translation is one of those keys that can unlock so much within innovation but often it just simply goes the other way and gets “lost in translation”

To apply a common language, we need to invest in its practice

The more we practice and move towards a common understanding of innovation, we are moving towards clarifying and reconciling, as best we can, within the constraints of what common language or context offers. We give innovation a greater chance to succeed. A common language enables greater transparency, clarity in accountability through its definitions; we achieve greater collaborative dialogues and meet more concurrence than without this move towards a common understanding.

So much of innovation is piecing together many fragmented pieces, strands of knowledge that can be unstructured can be very ambiguous, yet requires sound judgment. Innovation builds on shared experience and the quality of its interaction points. The more we learn to collaborate, the more we begin to share experiences, the more we achieve a growing common language. We need to bring together increasingly the parts that growing specialization, our limited grasp of all the complexities that can influence a decision. We need to constantly reconcile incoming information with our own language of understanding, so we need to strive towards improving the common parts surely?

I think as we build a common language we need a certain learning rhythm.

This is where absorptive capacity can come in, as it offers a structured way of building our knowledge understanding and fits within this. Absorptive capacity has the different steps of acquiring, assimilating, transforming and exploiting but these need a clear sequence, structure, and commonality to their approach, to gain the lasting benefit.

A common language of innovation working to a common end cause also allows for a knowledge learning repository to be built up, so all can potentially prosper as their starting point to innovate, as they learn from past experiences and insights. Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something

Innovation is something we all can do, not just a selected few but it is sharing our knowledge can encourage others to find the time and then invest in all of what it can mean to them; liberating them to explore alternatives and exploit their experiences by applying something ‘gained’ as something enhancing.

A bedrock for building and sustaining innovation is a common intent, language, and context

Forming a common language should be the bedrock for how we set about innovation. It cannot be silo driven or developed to fit one individual team, unless you want stilted results with incremental innovation being most likely as the best you can achieve most of the time, within this ‘constraint’, as we increasingly need to reach out and learn to collaborate

How we go about our communications, what and who you can connect with and your level of innovation engagement, do matter significantly. It is the ability to find the common identity, a real unifying sense of purpose that sends positive signals to all involved and those interested parties, often external to your ‘inner’ innovation process, to engage fully.

A common language can change much within innovation. Can we find the investment time to build this into the work we need to do? We should. It is in all of our future collaborating interests.

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Sorting through our Innovation Management Tools

@paul4innovating — Thu, 14 Jan 2016 11:25:57 +0000

We all are caught up in handling and understanding different management tools.

The numbers are accelerating, and if anything it’s adding more confusion to the pile we already have. So let’s see if we can help here, step back a little from your favourite tool and look at this just a little more deeply.

How do we pick through all the tools, let alone keep up with all the new ones emerging?

There are management tools that have become ‘enshrined’ in organizations and many of the executives become settled on the ones they have bothered to learn or seemingly do the job. The problem we are having, many of the traditional tools, many still taught in most management schools are lagging in the changing market we are operating in. Equally, there is such a growing movement on adopting new tools, many still in that lovely excuse of “being in Beta” that it does become confusing.

Tracking the trends in Management Tools
One of the consulting companies, Bain & Co has conducted the Bain’s Management Tools & Trends survey since 1993. The latest one for 2015 is here. They have made 15 surveys over the years and reported on the top 25 tools of each year. To be included they have to be relevant to senior management, topical and measurable.

The intent of this survey is to track what is ‘trending’, under what circumstances is it being used and how satisfied managers are with the results. It also helps provide better choices in selecting, implementing and integrating the different tools so as to hopefully improve an organization’s performance. Finally, when Bain conducts this survey they gather the opinions on a range of business issues and report the changing management priorities.

I have followed this for a number of years and yet I am constantly surprised how little this seems to have really changed or the tools used, yet we have such a groundswell of management tool makers or so we believe. If we want to get top management to change their beloved tools I feel it might take a different generation to sweep away the old guard and bring in the new.

Yet there are signs of tool management change

One company pioneering a change in tools is Strategyzer founded by Alex Osterwalder of Business Model Canvas fame. They are working towards a Strategyzer’s Toolbox of useful Business Tools.

They are positioning themselves on a mission to find the right remedy for designing future growth engines by wanting to fill that gap by creating a set of tools for business strategy, business design and innovation. Each one of them focuses on solving a specific business problem. I feel they have a long way to go but are certainly on a promising road.

For Strategyzer they define a business tool through Alex Osterwalder’s definition:
’Business Tools’ are conceptual frameworks that are specifically designed to help business practitioners solve a concrete (and limited) business problem in a real-world context. The best tools are conceptually sound, simple, practical, visual, have a great user interface (UI) and provide a great user experience (UX). It is these characteristics that make them ‘fit’ for the real world and increases adoption by business practitioners.

According to Strategyzer, Business Tools help strategists address today’s complex challenges in two ways: by providing a structured approach and a shared language.

Structured approach: tools frame strategic conversations and ensure all the important aspects of a problem are being addressed. They help organize information and prioritize the work.
Shared language: tools align teams around a visual concept, making complex ideas clearer with an image.

In Strategyzer’s view, there is clearly a gap between the tools a company uses to execute a known business model and the tools they use to design future growth engines.

Returning to Bain’s advice might help us work through the tool ‘desire and need’.

As companies seek to grow and innovate in an era of rapid technological change, they offer the following four suggestions based on their research to help managers get the most out of the tools they choose.

Get the facts: Every tool has strengths and weaknesses. And tools’ usefulness can change over time. To succeed, companies need to understand the full effects of each tool and then combine the right ones in the right ways at the right times. Peruse the research and talk to other tool users. Don’t naively accept hyperbole and simplistic solutions.
Champion enduring strategies, not fleeting fads: Line managers and tool experts don’t always have perfectly aligned agendas. Tool experts may have an engaging perspective, but managers must manage. Companies should champion realistic strategic directions and view tools as an aide, not a panacea.
Choose the best tools for the job: Managers should take a rational approach to selecting and implement tools. A tool will only improve results to the extent that it identifies customers’ unmet needs, builds distinctive capabilities, exploits competitor vulnerabilities and develops breakthrough strategies.
Adapt tools to your business system—not vice versa. Bain’s research shows, for example, that major efforts achieve significantly better satisfaction scores than limited ones. If management can only engage in a limited effort, it may be best to avoid using some tools. It’s also important to keep in mind that satisfaction scores for the same tool can vary widely depending on company size and region.

Bain also offers some further important insights
Over time, Bain’s research has provided a number of important insights. Among them:

Overall satisfaction with tools is moderately positive, but the rates of usage, ease of implementation, effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses vary widely
Management tools are much more effective when they are part of a major organization effort (critical point this)
Managers who bounce randomly from tool to tool undermine employees’ confidence
The hyperbole surrounding the trendiest of tools often leads to unrealistic expectations and disappointing results (chasing ‘Beta’ tools needs a possible cautious approach)
Decision-makers achieve better results by championing realistic strategies and viewing tools simply as a means to a strategic goal
No tool is a cure-all
Surprisingly globally, the trend toward using fewer tools continues, (which is in exact opposite of what I would have thought)

Then we get into Tool Usage Trends
Companies seem to be deploying a wide and ever-shifting array of management tools, to address business challenges and capture business opportunities. The number of adopted tools is partly determined by the organization’s size, its needs and its abilities to really apply the tools and get these well used in their company.

The size of the management effort is critical to determining tool satisfaction. The more they use the tool, and give emphasis to it, the more it seems to give satisfaction in capturing and delivering on the tool’s design.

Clearly, the importance of implementing tools across the organization needs top-down support and consistent use.

Presently the highest rated tool is Big Data Analytics; more than half of surveyed executives say that Advanced Analytics are transforming their marketing strategy.

Complexity Management was not a highly used tool even though increasing complexity was identified as one of the most pressing business challenges.

Putting real concerted effort into your chosen tool ‘delivers’ corporate satisfaction

In the above table, you can see different tools vary in their level of satisfaction based on the level of effort put into their implementation. Big Data for instance scores a 4.22 in satisfaction from increased effort and falls to 3.65 with limited effort. Innovation labs show similar variation (4.22 vs. 3.70). Digital transformations have the potential to go very badly, with a score of 4.17 for highly active efforts and 3.52 for low effort operations.

Sorting through the tools need real knowledge of their value and contribution

We also have to remember that the tools you select often have differences in their focus, is it more on revenue growth or cost-cutting, on innovation or customer relationships for example. This may be one reason for the increasing popularity of Big Data Analytics at present, which is helping companies more effectively segment and target customers as currently, companies are looking for greater growth.

Established market firms continue to lean toward using more traditional tools such as Benchmarking, still, the Balanced Scorecard and Employee Engagement Surveys are extensively used, even though these might come in different guises of simple to complex scorecards, dashboards or KPI initiatives, with lots of traffic lights and directional arrows ‘enhancing’ these.

Finally, one tool that is being put into place in the APAC region has for me a really high interest.

Disruptive Innovation Labs
On the 2015 list of Bain’s is Disruptive Innovation Labs. These foster disruptive innovations—high-risk, high-return breakthroughs that often start at the bottom of a market but eventually displace established competitors.

So What do Disruptive Innovation Labs do?

Disruptive innovations require different time frames, processes, performance metrics, people and skills than incremental (or “sustaining”) innovations. The evidence shows that Disruptive Innovation Labs work better when separated from core business operations.

Primary benefits of separation include the ability to acquire and retain exceptional talent, work within specialized facilities, offer a higher level of Freedom to challenge conventional wisdom, look to reduced bureaucracy and increased flexibility and offer more entrepreneurial cultures and incentives to build the culture to seek disruption.

Companies are using Disruptive Innovation Labs in different ways:
Research also shows that Disruptive Innovation Labs benefit from “soft integration” methods, such as social integration of senior teams, job rotations, collaborative planning, shared knowledge networks, and cross-functional teams and task forces.

These methods help to focus the lab’s efforts on real-world problems. They also reduce conflict, leverage existing assets and economies of scale, and encourage the adoption and deployment of breakthroughs.

Most management teams aspire to innovation “ambidexterity”—the ability to fully exploit existing assets while simultaneously exploring new capabilities required for future success.

Disruptive Innovation Labs push organizations beyond incremental improvements. They are often deployed in three situations:

When companies face new forms of competition that are stealing market share or reducing profitability
When traditional innovation methods are failing to deliver the required results
When management senses that the organization is growing complacent and needs concrete examples of bold innovations to raise its vision and transform the culture

So how aware of this specific trend in disruptive labs were you?

It is presently not trending very highly in Europe or North America and that must give many companies one or two alarm bells around innovation. It would be.

So if you would like to explore more the Management tool and trends survey for 2015 by Bain and Co here is a further link.

Tools and trends are certainly just piling up, have you established your toolkit yet? Time to take a deeper look at all that pile.

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Publishing note: This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission, I have this added to my own site

The post Sorting through our Innovation Management Tools first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Successful Innovation needs a common language, context and communicating

@paul4innovating — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 10:24:09 +0000

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

People disconnect because they lack what is needed to connect! Innovation thrives from the knowledge and you need to make sure this is allowed to flow.

To achieve those essential knowledge connections, you need a shared understanding of innovation, that common sense of purpose as a framework. This will though, always stay a work-in-progress.

You need to begin to build a common language of greater understanding. We need to unite around innovation. Imagine if you work consciously to put knowledge in the hands of people willing to make innovation happen, what the potential might be?

Give people the power of the context for their innovation engagement and that shifts everything to give them a clearer shape and meaning. You are laying out the conditions, criteria and circumstances, giving innovation its foundations.

Connecting the seven parts of the Innovation Work Mat

In this series of articles I will be looking at each of the seven components within the executive innovation work mat to raise questions, to probe and prompt the necessary thinking that needs to be made in organizations around building innovation that sustains and delivers to the strategic need.

This is the fifth post in the series, here I’m exploring the essential need to build a common language, gain growing identity through knowing the context for your innovation activities by communicating these to build a lasting innovation connection and organizational awareness. This flows from the top and cascade down the organization to make the essential connections and alignment.

Giving people space through communicating the common understanding

What would happen if you allow people to openly invent, to brainstorm, to generate initial concepts and prototypes because they understand the strategic innovation framework. One that lays out a vision of meaningful innovation that would be valued as it is more aligned to the strategic direction.

For me, the executive innovation work mat moderates an organizations innovation. It can go much towards reducing the multiple interpretations and personal agenda’s of a variety of initiatives often described or justified as essential innovation but constantly miss the strategic mark.

Closing the innovation gap design

If you have in place a clear innovation framework you offer a communicating mechanism to guide innovation activity. The framework can establish a common language, a growing sense of common cause for this to ignite innovations focused activity.

You can cascade this down the organization and actively look for the cascading effect to flow back up in new ideas, a sense of engagement and purpose.

You are looking for everyone involved to understand ‘the bigger picture’, to look towards the communicating platform so they can move their innovation activity back and forth within the structures, processes and systems designed for innovation to align them to the organizational strategic need.

Innovation becomes increasingly more connected as it is more integrated in its designs, use of resources and outcomes, to meet the more complex challenges being face in a competitive world.

Engagement can become the behavioural footprint needed for change

If you give each person a sense of meaning, that explicit and implicit encouragement because this is coming to them in an integrated message- the seven components of the executive innovation work mat – it can shift their mind, it can direct their energies. Engagement can become the catalyst for exciting innovation if there is this sense of trust, continuity and the identification is well-constructed and makes sense. Organizations do need a commonly shared framework that moderates innovation

There are so many aspects to get right in innovation. These can be ensuring the culture, climate and environment for innovation are working well, it could mean setting up processes, well-designed procedures and structures, it can be providing innovation governance.

Each part has a vital part to play in being combined for innovation, so it can function but these are not the core. Our identification with innovation is that core.

Working on innovation needs a deep commitment

German Late Medieval (c. 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.

We need to work hard to communicate that innovation is different than ‘business as usual’.

The fact ‘we’ are building something different and we need to build this together. A counter to existing processes, the commitment need is to overcome practices honed over many years.

This needs thinking through in its value and importance.

If the Senior Executive is not totally involved in creating the imperatives needed in innovation then the organization lacks the context. Signalling the kind of innovation and breadth of impact – delivers the vital aspects.

Well stated innovation objectives can shift the focus of the organization substantially. It generates collective building capacity.

Incremental to Disruptive require different engagement points – actions send signals to the organization and having clear governance provides guidance to risk, principles and the mechanisms to manage these two ‘extremes in innovation and all in-between.

By providing a strategic innovation framework you provide consistency in purpose, you are aligning innovation to strategic need and by actively engaging across the seven components, sharing their conclusions, these can create the dynamic aspects and sense of growing identity. You need to send a compelling set of messages throughout the organization.

Innovation engagement needs a common language, a clear sense of purpose of innovations context and the mechanisms to communicate and cascade these intents throughout the organization to bring people onto the same page.

Obtaining a ‘given’ flow for innovation

Designing a new strategic innovation framework at the top of organizations helps close the many gaps we see today. There is a flow for improving innovation performance. If we don’t frame the business context how can we compare and contrast? How do we know what we are missing or what it is meant to be achieving? When we go about seeking out opportunities we need to understand the context these are placed in.

Educating, informing, clarifying constantly simply helps formulate understanding and aids execution. We need to find ways to communicate a common language, a common way to frame the needs expected from innovation.

When we work together we can move mountains

You can eventually achieve a common identity that begins to move ‘mountains’ through collective achievement, one that is both distinctive and unique to your organization. A clear uniqueness that can never be copied, one that allows you to stand out as true distinctive innovators, admired and even envied.

We get closer to achieving a consistent, more vibrant innovation as it becomes more routine and embedded, for it becomes increasingly linked to everyone’s goals, a certain oneness and because of this, it is sustaining.

We identify as we understand what our contribution will be, then the leadership has done its primary job, its aligned innovation purpose to the goals, by laying out the parameters to achieve this.

Successful CEO’s achieve organisational connection

CEO’s that are seen to be successful achieve connections, what is often called that emotional connection through describing the context, setting the values and vision-driven criteria and by often pushing the organization towards ‘impossible goals’.

It is amazing how this brings alignment as long as it is consistent, constant in its messages and widely shared and understood and the organization see’s the leadership engaging, visibly seeking and believing in innovation and what it can potentially deliver.

Delivering a coherent and consistent innovation message that resonates

The Choice Cascade Integrative Innovation Model

This engagement needs a different honing than most organizations are certainly not capable of delivering, without thinking long and hard about the way they must undertake a more transformational pathway.

I suggest the Choice – Cascade integrated innovation model. One that can connect and deliver a consistent and coherent innovating performance across the organization.

I believe there is an essential gap within the way we set about innovation today. There is needing to be well-articulated and well-communicated innovation strategy that flows both ways in searching for the best solutions that align to the organizational strategic needs.

We need to find more fluid and flexible organizations that respond through searching for innovation consistency. They need to have a ‘flow’ of knowledge, of clarity, of a sense of scale in their learning and dialogues that promotes greater successful innovation outcomes as the sense of on-going mission.

The orchestrator needs to orchestrate.

We need to align, offer clear vision and purpose and this needs orchestrating from the top of the organization to the bottom. Organizations need an integrated innovation strategic framework that can deliver commonality in understanding, in purpose, in language. Then this needs to be cascaded

To do this you must orchestrate the capabilities, to purposefully build innovation. Orchestration is fundamentally dynamic, full of uncertainties but the need is still to connect the parts. To orchestrate you need to communicate and conduct to make the innovation music

The important “C’s” of innovation

The Seven Components that make up the Executive Innovation Work Mat

For me, the central part of the Executive Innovation Work Mat has been deliberately placed, it conveys the important “C’s”of innovation.

This is made up of the search to build a common language, to put innovation in its appropriate context, to work on communicating and cascading this throughout the organization can spark the distinctive aspects.

The ultimate aim is identification, understanding and then build up the capability, capacity and competencies required to deliver on the integrated approach taken. This is led from the top through this work mat approach and fully cascaded throughout the organization to align and bring innovation to life for all involved.

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